Ebbing Ebing
Via Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch
If she is normally developed mentally, and well-bred, her sexual desire is small. If this were not so the whole world would become a brothel and marriage and family impossible. It is certain that the man that avoids women and the woman that seeks men are abnormal ... nevertheless the sexual sphere occupies a much larger sphere in the consciousness of women than that of men, and is continual rather than intermittent.
Have fun unpacking *that* particular little bundle of spite.
Another note about Krafft-Ebing. In a post from the other day, also inspired by Greer, I remarked how few women are recorded as having formal sexual-displacement fetishes (e.g. displacing erotic fascination away from people and onto things.) I thought maybe that's because for most of history, as Greer suggests, women's *entire upbringing* amounts to the inculcation of one specific fetish. Turns out that nowhere in any of the 12 editions of his major work, Psychopathia Sexualis, with all its extensive case histories does Krafft-Ebing record a case of fetishism in women.
As the Wikipedia article puts it
Krafft-Ebing saw women as basically sexually passive, and recorded no female sadists or fetishists in his case studies. Behaviour that would be classified as masochism in men was categorized as "sexual bondage" in women, which was not a perversion, again because such behaviour did not interfere with procreation.
Which might not have been so bad if Psychopathia Sexualis wasn't also the *first* major medical/legal text on sexuality.
The thing that gets me is that sort of patriarchal/pre-third-wave assumption that the result of failing to impound women's sexuality would be *more* prostitution ("whole world would become a brothel") rather than quite a bit less.
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